The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (80 page)

11
.
Cannon Street
: Terminus for the South Eastern Railway, built in 1866 as an extension of the line from London Bridge and thereby bringing commuters closer to the City.

12
.
Capital and Counties Bank
: Conan Doyle's and Holmes's own bank, as we discover in ‘The Priory School', from
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
.

13
.
Fresno Street, which branches out of Upper Swandam Lane
: Possibly Bennet's Hill, which branches out of Upper Thames Street.

14
.
vestas
: Matches named after the Roman goddess of fire.

15
.
Threadneedle Street
: Home of the Bank of England, which is occasionally described as ‘the old lady of Threadneedle Street'. The turning, home of London's merchant tailors, was originally Three-Needle Street.

16
.
a small angle in the wall
: There is such an angle at no. 51.

17
.
our short drive, starting in Middlesex… ending in Kent
: In 1889, the year in which the story is set, the County of London came into being. Prior to this a building located near Paul's Wharf would have been in Middlesex, the nearest crossing-point on the south side would have been in Surrey, and Lee, ‘seven miles' drive from London', in Kent.

18
.
mousseline-de-soie
: Soft silk fabric.

19
.
I am not hysterical, nor given to fainting
: But earlier, on seeing the blood upon the window above the Bar of Gold, Mrs St Clair had fainted.

20
.
Gravesend postmark
: See ‘The Five Orange Pips', note
39
.

21
.
Charing Cross
: The junction of Trafalgar Square and Whitehall, named after the village of Cherringe, where Edward I installed one of several crosses in memory of his wife Eleanor along the route of her funeral procession from Lincoln to Westminster in 1291.

22
.
Gladstone bag
: A leather travelling bag which opens wide, named after the Victorian prime minister William Ewart Gladstone(1809–98).

23
.
Wellington Street
: Home of the Lyceum theatre, outside which Holmes and Watson wait for Mary Morstan's party in
The Sign of Four
. The office of Dickens's
All the Year Round
and
Household Words
magazines was based here in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

24
.
Bow Street
: When the novelist and barrister Henry Fielding was appointed a magistrate based in Bow Street in 1749 he appointed six ‘thief-takers' to aid the largely ineffectual parish constables and watchmen. They came to be known as the Bow Street Runners, Britain's first police force. In 1839 they were disbanded and replaced by the Metropolitan Force.

25
.
The man's face peeled off under the sponge
: In Wilkie Collins's
The Moonstone
(1868) a sailor is spotted entering the Wheel of Fortune in Shore Lane, near Lower Thames Street. When he fails to reappear Sergeant Cuff and the police break down the door and find a man dressed as a sailor dead on the bed. Sergeant Cuff then pulls off the man's black wig and beard.

26
.
I am illegally detained
: Why is St Clair/Boone not charged with wasting police time?

27
.
green-room
: Room in a theatre originally painted green where actors wait to enter the stage.

28
.
and fixed one side of my lip
: Reminiscent of Victor Hugo's L'Homme qui rit, from the 1870 novel of the same name, whose lips were scarred when he was a child causing him to perpetually smile.

29
.
dollars
: A dollar was until recently slang for five shillings (25p).

30
.
squalid beggar
: The Capital and Counties Bank where St Clair/Boone has £220 to his credit was at 39 Threadneedle Street near the ‘small angle in the wall' where he begs.

31
.
varied by silver
: In W. M. Thackeray's
The Memoirs of Mr C. J. Yellowplush
Frederic Altamont journeys to the City every day but refuses to reveal what he does during the eight hours he spends there. When his wife discovers a silver Queen Anne sixpence in the money he gives her she surmises that he sweeps the road by Cornhill.

32
.
That note
: Reminiscent of Émile Gaboriau's
Monsieur Lecoq
(1869), in which the Count disguised as a tramp is taken into custody but is able to send a message to his wife by code.

First published in the
Strand
in January 1892. Alternative title: ‘The Christmas Goose that Swallowed the Diamond' (
Philadelphia Inquirer
). The title was probably inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne's ‘The Great Carbuncle', and the plot by an article in
Cassell's Saturday Journal
(25 April 1891) in which a diamond slips into the muzzle of a gun while the owner is grouse shooting, but is spotted missing before the weapon is fired. The owner then ruminates on the possibility of the stone becoming embedded in the ‘inside of a bird… [astonishing] the cook when she came to prepare it'.
Tit-Bits
contained an article on 5 September 1891 entitled ‘Clever Diamond Smuggling', in which a smuggler hides three diamonds in meat and feeds them to a dog to evade American customs officers. The story could be set in or around 1887.

1
.
commissionaire
: i.e. a member of the Corps of Commissionaires, originally wounded soldiers for whom civilian employment was found as door-keepers or caretakers.

2
.
billycock
: A round, felt hat named after William Coke, the first wearer of such a hat.

3
.
Goodge Street
: A side-street leading from Tottenham Court Road towards the Middlesex Hospital. There is a tube station called Goodge Street but it is on Tottenham Court Road, a short distance north of the junction with Goodge Street.

4
.
some thousands of Bakers, and some hundreds of Henry Bakers
: In the 1890 directory there were only seven Henry Bakers in London and only 139 Bakers in all.

5
.
a man with so large a brain must have something in it
: An assumption linked to the then fashionable belief in phrenology, the study of the shape and size of the skull. Some scientists believed that there was a correlation between the size of the brain and the depth of intellect, and the brains of deceased criminals, madmen, writers and politicians were often weighed.

6
.
If this man ordered one, it is a sign of a certain amount of foresight
: Or the sign of a good salesman.

7
.
perspired very freely, and could, therefore, hardly be in the best of training
: Everybody perspires so this reasoning is faulty, although one wonders whether Conan Doyle, who was in reasonably good training given his penchant for demanding sports, examined his own hat.

8
.
crop
: Part of a bird's oesophagus in which food is stored.

9
.
It cuts into glass as though it were putty
: Which proves nothing; so does glass.

10
.
blue carbuncle
: A carbuncle is a garnet which comes in a variety of colours, but never blue.

11
.
the Hotel Cosmopolitan
: Fictitious.

12
.
Assizes
: See ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery', note
18
.

13
.
run down to the advertising agency
: Conan Doyle originally inserted the name of a real advertising agency, Willing's, but the
Strand
's editors chose not to allow them a free plug.

14
.
Oh, in the Globe, Star, Pall Mall… and any others that occur to you
: A roster that seems barely credible now when there is only one evening paper in London, the
Evening Standard
.

15
.
banks of the Amoy River in Southern China
: There is no Amoy River in China but Amoy is a Chinese city on the River Kiulung.

16
.
forty-grain weight
: Gems are weighed in carats, not grains.

17
.
crystallized charcoal
: Holmes, a chemist, should know that charcoal, which consists of carbon, crystallizes as a diamond, not as a carbuncle, which would consist of amalgams of metals such as calcium, iron, magnesium and manganese as well as silicon. Or perhaps the so-called blue carbuncle is a blue diamond.

18
.
Scotch bonnet
: Scottish headgear made out of soft wool also known as a tam o'shanter, named after the hero of Burns's eponymous poem (1790).

19
.
disjecta membra
: Latin, ‘the limbs of the dismembered', from ‘
Invenias… disjecti membra poetae
' – ‘You will find… the limbs of the dismembered poet', Horace,
Satires
I, iv, line 62;it refers to finding traces of a poet's original words after translation.

20
.
Alpha Inn near the Museum
: Since the pub is in Bloomsbury and the museum the British Museum, the Alpha is either the Museum Tavern at 49 Great Russell Street or the Plough at 27 Museum Street. The latter is more likely as Alpha is the first star in the constellation of the Plough.

21
.
doctors' quarter
: Private consultancies can still be found in prestigious addresses on Harley Street, in Marylebone to the east of Baker Street.

22
.
Bloomsbury
: Dignified district around the British Museum and London University, best known for the early twentieth-century Bloomsbury Group of artists and writers which included Virginia Woolf.

23
.
Covent Garden Market
: Primarily a fruit and vegetable market and not a place where one would go for geese. The market, which gave its name to the area, stood there from 1656 to 1974 when it moved to Battersea. It was originally a garden belonging to the abbey or
convent
of St Peter, Westminster.

24
.
Now then, Mr Cocksure
: One of a number of avian puns and jokes in the story. Earlier, a hat is described as a ‘billycock', Holmes wonders whether he should ask Mrs Hudson to examine the crop of a woodcock he is going to have for supper; Breckinridge, who has his head ‘cocked', describes Holmes as Mr Cocksure, and will prove him to be a goose once he shows him the
sales ledger; later Holmes lets the thief go rather than make a ‘gaol-bird' of him.

25
.
117 Brixton Road
: Brixton Road is a major traffic route connecting Kenning-ton and Brixton two miles south of central London. No. 117 was a real house, which is surprising given that Conan Doyle rarely used real addresses, but it may have been chosen as it then stood on the corner of Brixton Road and what was then (another) Baker Street.

26
.
7s.6d.
: the equivalent of 37
^½
pence.

27
.
12s.
: The equivalent of 60 pence.

28
.
Pink 'Un
: The sports sections of some newspapers were printed on pink paper to differentiate them from the rest of the paper or other editions of the paper. Some sporting papers are still printed in this fashion.

29
.
The King of Proosia
: The King of Prussia at that time was Wilhelm II(1859–1941), grandson of Queen Victoria, who was German kaiser during the First World War. A number of London pubs were called the King of Prussia at this time.

30
.
Pentonville
: Pentonville Prison, Caledonian Road, half a mile north of King's Cross Station.

31
.
Kilburn
: A shabby suburb lying two miles north-west of Baker Street.

32
.
I would take my goose now, and in it I would carry my stone
: T. S. Blakeney in ‘Some Disjecta Membra' (
Sherlock Holmes Journal
4.3 (Winter 1959), pp.
101
–3) explains how John Wrott, steward of Robert Walpole, the first prime minister, used to send tenants' rents to his master inside geese to hoodwink highwaymen.

33
.
without ever having touched the wealth
: The theme of the thief trying to retrieve a stolen jewel he has hidden is used again in ‘The Six Napoleons' from
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
.

34
.
its solution is its own reward
: But who will get the reward money from the Countess of Morcar – Holmes or Peterson? If the former, then Holmes is not committing a felony but compounding it.

First published in the
Strand
in February 1892. Alternative title: ‘The Spotted Band (
New York World
). A probable source was an article in
Cassell's Saturday Journal
of 14 February 1891, in which an explorer is woken by the noise of a boa constrictor making its way down the wall from a ventilation shaft. Conan Doyle referred to the tale in a letter to his mother. He also considered ‘The Speckled Band' to be the best Holmes story (excluding those that appeared in
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
), as revealed in the
Strand
in June 1927; as did
the Strand 's readers, readers of the Observer the same year, and the Baker Street Irregulars in a 1944 poll and at their hundredth-anniversary dinner in 1959. The story is set in 1883.

1
.
Stoke Moran
: Fictitious, although there is a Stoke D'Abernon three miles from Leatherhead in Surrey.

2
.
Dr Grimesby Roylott
: John A. Hodgson in ‘The Recoil of the Speckled Band',
Poetics Today
, 1992, suggested a pun with Grimesby Roylott standing for ‘crimes by Roylott', and Stoke Moran as an anagram of ‘snake o'mort', but notes that ‘such Poesque name games are not typical of Conan Doyle'.